


the unknown

by KathrynShadow



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Legends: Knights of the Old Republic
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Introspection, Mild Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-13
Updated: 2016-11-13
Packaged: 2018-08-30 16:59:42
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,840
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8541328
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KathrynShadow/pseuds/KathrynShadow
Summary: He was still looking after her. She’d do the same for him.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [virusq](https://archiveofourown.org/users/virusq/gifts).



> Couldn't pick an idea, went with all of them a little bit. Hope this is to your liking, friend!

“Revan?”

It took her a few seconds to realize that she was meant to respond, after so long—no, she corrected herself, after a couple of years being called something else. And a lifetime’s worth of fake memories to back it up.

She pursed her lips, not looking up from her ( _her_ , damn it; she saw it first, probably) blaster. “It’s just Revan now?” she asked, a slight, cautious edge to her voice.

Carth looked a little chagrined. “I thought that—” he said, and then cut himself off. “Never mind.”

“You thought what?”

There was a pause. “I thought that… maybe you’d want to go back to being called that. Since it was your real name.”

It wasn’t. It was just a Darth title. She remembered her original name, vaguely, she… thought, but it was another thing cluttered up in her new double memories: impossible to tell, oftentimes, which set had really happened. (She still didn’t know how she felt about that. The Council had its reasons for what it did, she was sure, and this was certainly a preferable alternative to rotting in a prison for recaptured Dark Jedi for the rest of her life, but…)

“You can call me what you want to, Carth,” she said, checking the pieces of the disassembled blaster before starting to slide them back together again. “I don’t want to—” she continued.

“I don’t want you to feel—” Carth began at exactly the same moment. They both stopped in comical unison.

After a second, she chuckled, glancing up at him. “I just know that if I were you, I wouldn’t want to be reminded of what you did to me. That’s all.”

“And if I were you, I wouldn’t want to think that you can’t accept me for what you know damn well I’m not.” Carth looked equal parts amused and concerned. “I’ll call you what you want me to.”

“And if I don’t know what that is yet?”

Carth shrugged with a small smile. “Then I’ll call you everything until you figure out what you like the best.”

She raised her eyebrows, placing the reassembled blaster on the table and leaning back in her chair to look at him. “Are you going to start calling me Revan in bed?”

That startled him into a laugh, which he tried to cover up with a cough. “No,” he answered. “No, I don’t think that’s going to happen.” Carth paused and a flicker of concern pulled his expression. “Unless you _want_ me to, I mean. I can try to work with that.”

A roll of her eyes as she got to her feet, circling the table to walk over to him. “I already told you, Carth. I’m not going to make you call me anything.” She closed the distance, faltering before stopping a step away. About as close as people who weren’t her got to people who weren’t him on the Ebon Hawk, even given the cramped nature of the ship. She figured it was a safe distance, just in case he was… not sure about her, or something. She didn’t even know what she was worried about, just that she was worried about it. And she couldn’t remember enough to know if it was just a generic bad feeling or a Force-driven one, so she didn’t want to risk it. Not with him.

Carth cleared his throat, but didn’t move; he just looked down at her with an expression of… what, exactly?

“I’ll keep that in mind,” he said. He paused, mouth opening as if to say something else; then, he just reached for her, one of his hands finding her hip and the other one landing on her waist.

He looked at her. She looked back. For a few seconds, nothing happened.

To chaos with risk. She kissed him. He froze at first, but only at first; instinct took over soon enough—or maybe habit, or maybe he was just waiting for her to do that all along—and he pulled her in closer, his mouth teasing gently at hers.

The ship was quiet even outside of her room; she could feel, albeit dimly, the presences of her crewmates through her recently (re)discovered connection to the Force. Most were asleep. Canderous was using three separate crates in the cargo hold as a chair and carefully checking his armor for damage. Teethree was out on the hull repairing a crack in a bundle of cables. Mission was curled almost in a perfect ball and snoring softly.

Which was all a very good thing, since she really, _really_ wasn’t interested in anyone but Carth needing her for anything right now.

“Thinking about something?” he murmured against her mouth.

She kind of wanted to know how he could tell when his eyes were closed. Maybe there was some kind of latent Force sensitivity going on that neither one of them knew about. It definitely wasn’t the most important thing at hand just then.

“Why? Do you have any ideas?”

Carth chuckled, the sound low and affectionate in his throat as he moved to gently kiss her neck. “Maybe one or two.”

* * *

It was the last night before she left for the Unknown Regions and she still hadn’t figured out how to tell him. She was going to—really, _truly_ she was going to. But.

The first word died before it could even form itself in her thoughts, let alone on her tongue. She couldn’t. Not out of cowardice (at least not completely, and she _hoped_ not at all), but out of the knowledge that if he had even the slightest inkling of where she was going and what she was looking for, he would follow her. With everything he had, for the rest of his life. Because he loved her.

She couldn’t do that to him, couldn’t let him do that to himself. Especially not if he actually managed to find her. The memories were… hazy, more night terrors than visions, but they were clear enough to follow. Darth Revan had left more than just the Star Forge behind her. Bigger things. _Worse_ things. (What things? She didn’t know. She just knew they were there.)

Carth would follow her into Wild Space if she let him. So she just had to not let him.

He had to know something was wrong, but he didn’t say anything. He kissed her, let her pull him down onto their tiny space station bunk. She fumbled with his trousers the way she hadn’t since the first time they had sex; he didn’t quite untie the belt of her robes all the way, opting instead to just tug her pants down as soon as the fabric was loose enough for that. She rode him hard and fast and desperate, kissing his shoulder his neck his jaw his mouth. Carth peeled her robes off of one shoulder to free one of her breasts, thumbing the nipple before bending to put his mouth to her skin. She hissed out a sound, one hand on his thigh for support while the other held onto his arm for balance. They whispered to each other, hushed and fragmented rambles in the dark. He called her by the name he met her with; almost everyone else had taken to just adopting “Revan” for simplicity’s sake, but Carth used her other name almost as an endearment made just for him.

He didn’t ask her what was wrong. She almost wondered why he didn’t, but… but she was always the one doing the questioning whenever _he_ was quiet. Maybe he just wasn’t the same way.

(She almost wished that he was.)

Or, she reasoned as they fell asleep in silence, maybe she was better at hiding it than he was.

* * *

The _Hawk_ was too damn quiet when it wasn’t stuffed full of people. Revan (as good a name as any, and the name most people knew her by anyway, so why shouldn’t she take it now?) found herself pacing more often than not, opening panels and closing them, tinkering with a hyperspace drive that was already as perfect as it could possibly get. Teethree booped softly at her, but apparently didn’t feel like striking up much of a conversation.

Or she didn’t feel like striking up much of a conversation and it was contagious. One of those.

She was on her third wander through the storage areas on that day. She wasn’t really expecting to notice anything new for obvious reasons, but she checked the little drawers in their— in her bedroom, knowing they were going to be empty.

Something rattled inside the last one.

Revan frowned, opening the compartment the rest of the way and peering inside. _She’d know that blaster anywhere_ but she still curled her fingers around the metal, pulled it out to turn it over in her hands.

The wear on the grip. The little scar along the right edge from a blaster bolt that had gone straight into his shoulder. The myriad of other nicks and scratches that he had just never quite been able to polish or buff away. The weight of it, the feel of it in her palm.

She’d known that Carth knew she was going to leave. He had to have known that he couldn’t stop her, that she _needed_ to do this, that it was for his sake as much as anyone else’s. But this was his blaster, and he was never far behind…

Revan turned, almost running towards the cockpit as if her discovery would have simply made him appear in the pilot’s seat out of nowhere. As if she hadn’t checked the entire damn ship over so many times that Teethree was probably trying to convince HK to download some kind of therapist protocol. As if she couldn’t simply reach out through the Force and already tell immediately that there was no one else on the ship but the droids that she’d brought with her in the first place—

The cockpit was empty. Revan faltered, but only for a moment. She squeezed the grip of Carth’s blaster, holding it with equal parts reverence and resolve.

He was still looking after her. She’d do the same for him.

* * *

Canderous didn’t get the chance to work alongside Carth as much as he used to. Weird how that worked.

Weirder how the old man didn’t even seem to consider the _possibility_ of changing. His back might be giving out from age, but he still had the posture of a soldier, still looked around the room as if he fully expected to have to go to war to protect whomever was in it.

And he was still rambling, in his cautiously enthused way, about the rogue Jedi he’d fallen for to anyone who made the mistake of showing interest.

Funny, Canderous thought. Even with his wife MIA for more years than they’d even known each other, Carth still seemed more relaxed and happier than he’d been before the Star Forge was destroyed.

She was just good for him, he guessed.


End file.
